Thursday, April 21, 2011

Every year, at CU Boulder, there is a big celebration/"protest" for 4/20. Officially it is a protest of weed still being illegal. In reality, it is a bunch of people getting high in public in front of cops. This year's celebration was no different. Since Boulder already has very progressive laws towards weed, CU makes sense as a place to get together to smoke. Many people from around the state, and even some people from out of the state all congregate from about 3:00 to 4:25 to play music, sit in circles, hoola-hoop, and, of course, smoke lots of weed.

Norlin Quad before...

The police maintain a presence, mostly to intimidate. Obviously, it's working well. ^.^ The fat one looking at the camera told me that his face is trademarked so, "this shit better not end up on Facebook"

Let the ... protest... begin

Everybody's gettin ready

Versace weed bag and shirt, check

Some never miss the opportunity to capitalize ^.^

2:30

3:30

Didn't you know? weed is good for you.

And the real party begins

Bananas made it

So did the Ghostbusters

4:00, people as far as the eye can see

4:20!!! Ever wonder what 10,000 people smoking at the same time looks like? Now you know. P.S. That cloud over the crowd isn't fog...

Annnd immediately afterwards, the police rush the field to get everyone to go home... you showed us, occifers

Really, everyone rushed across the street for munchies

This line was like 100 people long

Some of us don't know our limit...

All in all, it was a good day. I dunno how clear we made it that weed shouldn't be legal, but hey, at least we all got real high.

Monday, April 11, 2011

I think it's been like a week since I posted last, I've been busy because of the CWA. The conference on world affairs is a conference held in Boulder every year with guests from all over the world in all kinds of specialties. They sit on panels that are loosely related to their specialties, and bring a different perspective to many important issues in the country and world.

One of the most interesting talks I saw was by a girl, only 24 years old, named Gigi Ibrahim. She lives in Egypt, and was one of the original activists and protestors in the Egyptian revolution. She talked about how long before the revolution, she saw how bad things were in Egypt under Mubarak. Because the media is censored there, and there is no real independent media source, any protest or plan for protest would never be published. So, to be able to participate in the protests, you had to know someone who knew the details. If you didn't, it was likely that you'd never hear about it happening at all. Through a professor at her university, Gigi got in contact with a small group of revolutionaries who set up protests in Cairo. She attended every one for a year, using the internet to set up meeting places, times, plans, and trying to get more people to join. She said every time, they would start at the edges of the city and call for people to join them in protest. Every time the people would ignore them, and they would end up alone in the middle of Cairo, the same 100 or so people every time.
When this really started to change was when the man in Tunisia burnt himself to death after being mistreated by a police officer. From there, the protest in Tunisia started, and soon tehy had overthrown their oppressive dictator. This started to give the people of Egypt hope that they could do the same.
It wasn't long after this that Mubarak shut off Facebook and Twitter, then the whole internet, then cell phone companies. People couldn't communicate with each other, and protests couldn't be arranged anymore. But, Gigi and some others were able to get on Twitter using Tor and a bridge and organize their group to action.
The next time Gigi and her fellow revolutionaries protested, they started at the edge of the city like always, calling people to arms. For the first time in her life, people listened, and flooded into the streets in thousands. Everyone was finally tired of letting their government walk all over them and make them feel powerless.
When they got to the building where they were going to protest, the cops started shooting the group with rubber bullets and tear gas. There were enough people and they were angry enough that they rushed the police officers and established a place in the square. The power was finally back with the people. After some brutal fighting, Gigi getting shot with a rubber bullet in the back, buildings burning, and many people getting killed, Mubarak finally stepped down.
This victory would have been a complete fantasy for most Egyptians just a month before it was achieved. Gigi and her group of protestors knew that the power always lies with the people, and without that knowledge and hope that things can change, we are at the whim of violent dictators like Mubarak. People need to realize that this is their life, and their country. If we want the government to treat us better, it is up to us. Nobody is going to do it for us. Obama doesn't have our best interests in mind and neither does anyone else. We have to be the voice of the people because we are the people. Revolution is in our hands, we just have to believe.
These days, Gigi has over 9000 followers on her Twitter including president Obama. Egypt is working on rebuilding their country the way they want, and people finally have a voice again. They should be an inspiration to us all to take back the power, and tell the government how we want it to run.

Saturday, April 2, 2011

Today, my friend was talking about how she is getting laser eye surgery soon, and how after the surgery she will see halos around light because her eyes will be so dilated. This made me think about how we view reality. It is funny that some things we see and think "this is reality", and some things we see, and without question think "this isn't real". A good example is the haloes that my friend will see. She will see the light coming from a lamp and think that it is real, but the haloes of color around the light are just an aspect of her dilated eyes and not real. But, this is a deceiving idea of reality, even though it is one that is commonly held. If we look at something blue, the light reflecting off of it hits our eyes, and our brains interpret those light waves as the color blue. But really, that something is emitting a ton of light waves that we can't see at all. So, if we could see the object in reality, it would look a lot different than the interpretation our mind makes for it. This is true of all color, because all color is is our mind attempting to interpret a short spectrum of light that bounces off of objects. If not constrained by our minds and eyes, reality would look a lot different than what we see.
So, to think that we are directly seeing reality is naive, because we are only seeing our mental interpretation of reality. We take our perception of our senses, and view it as reality, when really it is just our perception. It makes sense that we think we are seeing and interacting with reality, because it is all we can possibly know. If we can't trust our senses, we can't know anything about the world, and if we can't know anything about the world, we can't successfully interact with it. But, since the only 'view' of reality we get is through our sense perceptions, it seems like we need to have a way to verify that our perceptions are accurate in order to justifiably believe that we are seeing anything that even closely resembles reality. But the only way to test our senses is through other senses. I can go to a doctor and take a hearing test, but i only 'know' the doctor exists by seeing him, hearing him, maybe smelling or feeling him. Aka, I only 'know' the doctor exists because I am trusting my senses. So the doctor can't verify that my senses are working because i need verification of my senses in order to verify that the doctor is real.
Basically what this leads to is the realization that senses can't verify senses. Coupled with the fact that the only way we have to verify anything is through our senses, and we get the conclusion that our only means of verification of reality is unverifiable. Therefore, we aren't justified in believing our senses, because we can't verify them. And since our senses are our means of justifying every single other belief we had about reality, we aren't justified in believing anything at all about reality. So, when you see that light and the halo around it, you can say the halo isn't real, its just my eyes, but you should also say the light isn't necessarily real, and neither is the light post it's coming from, or the ground it is sitting on, or the body that this thought is coming from.